Diana consults with religious organizations, leads conferences for religious leaders, and teaches and preaches in a variety of venues. She regularly comments on religion, politics, and culture in the media including USA Today, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, CNN, FOX, PBS, and NPR. From 1995 to 2000, she wrote a weekly column on American religion for the New York Times Syndicate. She is a contributing editor for Sojourners Magazine.

Entries by Diana Butler Bass

I love Arizona. I grew up there, a proud honors graduate of Saguaro High School, where I was president of the Teen-Age Republicans. Indeed, I was such a good teen-age Republican that in 1976 Sen Goldwater named me Arizona State Teen-Age Republican of the Year. I still...

In 2007, New York Times columnist David Brooks asked Barack Obama if he had ever read the Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. "I love him," the then-senator replied. "He's one of my favorite philosophers."

Reinhold Niebuhr, whose career spanned the mid-twentieth century, was an influential theologian when public theology...

June 5 is World Environment Day. Similar to Earth Day, WED celebrates the global movement for environmental activism by commemorating the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the first such international conference.

June 5 also marks the Feast Day of St. Boniface (672-754), the patron...

Around Good Friday 1373, an English woman laid a-bed, stricken by the plague, and facing what she thought would be her own death. Much of her life is a mystery. We know not if she was single or married, but if she had been married before that fateful season, the...

With FOX News seeking to expose those who refuse to say "Merry Christmas" as secular collaborators to the War on Christmas, I confess that I am confused. FOX holds itself up as the network that stands by traditional values defending America and faith from...

In recent days, conservatives have attacked the Episcopal Church. The reason? The church has just concluded its once every three-year national meeting, and in this gathering the denomination affirmed a liturgy to bless same-sex unions. Conservatives assert that the Episcopal Church's ever-increasing social and political progressivism has led to a...

In his Newsweek cover story, "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus," Andrew Sullivan dissects the crisis of American Christianity--it has become hypocritical and irrelevant to millions. Organized religion is collapsing; atheism is rising. The wounded, lapsed, and doubting seek shelter in spirituality, away from the buildings and traditions that...

Something startling is happening in American religion: We are witnessing the end of church or, at the very least, the end of conventional church. The United States is fast-becoming a society where Christianity is being reorganized after religion.

As the stand off between workers and Governor Scott Walker continues in Wisconsin, religious leaders have weighed in on the dispute. Roman Catholic bishops came out on the side of the unions, urging the governor to protect worker's rights. Many mainline pastors, including Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists,...

As a working mother who lives in the Washington-metro area, I admit that I'm dreading Bravo's new program The Real Housewives of D.C. (begins August 5). I took some comfort in the Washington Post's scathing advance review of it:

A survey released today in California reveals change in voters' attitudes toward marriage for gay and lesbian couples. Less than two years after Proposition 8 restricted marriage to heterosexual couples, only one person in five now says that Proposition 8 was a "good thing" for California,...

One of the most significant trends in American religion is switching: people who grew up in one religion and changed to another. Another important but often ignored trend is the decline of conservative churches. So, I'm curious: How many of you have switched out of a conservative church into another...

It is hard to write those words, even harder to post them. But part of dying is the practice of the public memorial, spoken words in eulogies and written ones in obituaries. After death, words communicate joy and grief, appreciation and...